Intelligence Prime Capital has received a securities fraud warning from the Central Bank of Ireland.

No that’s not a typo. This is the same Intelligence Prime Capital that collapsed a year ago.

As per the CBI’s April 25th warning;

It has come to the Central Bank of Ireland’s (‘Central Bank’) attention that a firm, calling itself, Intelligence Prime Capital Ltd (no longer operational) has been operating as an investment firm / investment business firm in the absence of an appropriate authorisation and purporting to be based in Ireland.

This is the equivalent of a securities fraud warning in other jurisdictions.

While the CBI does acknowledge Intelligence Prime Capital is “no longer operational”, you’re probably still wondering why the warning now?

To fool investors, apparently at some point Intelligence Prime Capital was using a CBI “authorization number”.

As noted by CBI;

The entity cloned the authorisation number of a legitimate Central Bank authorised firm in order to deceive consumers.

It should be noted that there is no connection whatsoever between the Central Bank authorised firm and the unauthorised Intelligence Prime Capital.

What this highlights is that, even when an MLM company appears to have registered with a financial regulator, where matters.

If an MLM company has registered in a jurisdiction it’s not soliciting investment in, the registration is meaningless. MLM companies need to be registered in jurisdictions they are soliciting investment in.

With that out of the way, what on Earth is going on over the CBI?

Intelligence Prime Capital was a largeish MLM Ponzi scheme that surfaced in mid to late 2021.

Following timely fraud warnings from Russia, Canada and Spain, Intelligence Prime Capital collapsed in February 2022.

Apparently it’s taken CBI fourteen months after the fact to realize Intelligence Prime Capital’s CBI authorization number was bogus.

And this isn’t the first weirdness out of CBI this year either. Back in January CBI issued a BeOnWise securities fraud warning.

BeOnWise was again an MLM Ponzi scheme that collapsed eight months earlier in May 2022.

I’m not sure if this is a delay on CBI’s part in getting these warnings out or if they just move really slowly. Either way from a regulatory standpoint, issuing warnings eight to fourteen months after a Ponzi scheme has collapsed seems pointless.

Someone at CBI is either overwhelmed or slacking off. Hopefully it’s the former, with internal procedures now in place to deal with future backlogs.